At Home With a Ghost - 12

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


At the end of my period of “channeling” music from my dead grandfather, I turned away from the five-song cycle (“Songs of Puberty”) I had composed with his help, and turned to a new project. I considered my career as a singer-songwriter to be over, and an opportunity had come along to pursue my long-held ambition to be novelist.

I don’t want to dwell on the subject of my book “Dry Hustle”; suffice it to say that I spent part of 1976 traveling with a pair of women who were con artists. They specialized in preying on males, raising the men’s hope of sexual favors and then absconding with their money. I go into greater detail in my author video:



This adventure went against everything I’d been raised to respect. I could legitimately call it research, but the fact remains that I did participate in behavior that was immoral, illegal, and ungrammatical. I readily absorbed lessons for lying and psychological manipulation; I was thrilled to be in the world of criminals; I adopted their patterns of speech, employing lots of double negatives: “I don’t got no morals.”

I ignored the cries coming from my lacerated conscience, making myself deaf through routine applications of Irish coffee. This is one of the evilest drinks ever: an over-the-counter speedball. The coffee makes you manic, the third-rate whiskey makes you morose, and the Reddi-Whip is the final insult. In case the whiskey won out over the coffee and I blacked out, I carried a concealed tape recorder in my purse and taped our encounters with our “marks” so I could replay it the next day and thus remember what the hell I did.

On one such morning, following a blackout, I woke to find myself in a Las Vegas hotel bedroom which I shared with one of the con women. Her bed was empty. And sitting in a corner armchair, silently observing me, was a strange man.

My blood froze. Then the phone beside me rang.

The guy continued to stare at me as I picked up the receiver. It was my roommate. “Happy birthday,” she crowed. (It was not my birthday.) “I picked him out for you as a present. You need to get laid. He’s the drummer in Elvis’ band,” she added before hanging up.

Ah, a musician. Somehow that made him okay, because otherwise he looked like a drug dealer. My curiosity aroused, I surreptitiously reached into my purse and turned on the tape recorder. Thus I have it on record that he was not Elvis’ drummer. Later I learned he was not a drug dealer either. He was a drug runner.

I liked him, though. He was surprisingly witty and courteous. I told myself he would make a good character in my novel, my excuse for deliberately courting disaster in those days. He was consistent with my ongoing romance with the criminal underworld.

Months after my “research” period, I holed up in a cheap apartment off the Pacific Coast Highway to continue writing my novel and drinking Irish coffee. I suppose I can blame the Four Roses for contacting the drug runner, who lived south of L.A., and inviting him over. So he made an excuse to his wife and drove up.

He seemed sort of wobbly when he showed up, but his wit was intact and I still liked him. So we got horizontal for a while. The tape recorder in my purse beside the bed was on, of course. But even without the tape I can well remember his face inches from mine as he told me he shot and killed a guy in Mexico once, for being a snitch. When I looked horrified, he explained, as if it was normal, “That’s the only thing you can do with a snitch. ‘Cause he’s just gonna snitch again.”

I did not feel very secure after his confession. I was relieved when he excused himself to go into the bathroom so I could be alone to consider my situation. I told myself: Now you’ve really gone and done it. You’re alone with a murderer. You don’t got no more sense than a turnip.

I was about to throw on some clothes to escape, when he emerged from the bathroom. He could barely walk. Instantly I knew he’d shot up in there. Make that a murderer and a junkie. As he made his way back in my general direction, he lost his balance and fell to the carpet.

He was trying to struggle to his feet when there was a wrenching sound from the wall heater. The entire metal cover burst off the heater and was hurled at him, slamming him hard on the shoulder.

As I said, Grandpa did not approve of some of my boyfriends.

The last thing the junkie heard before his eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out on the carpet was me yelling at my grandfather.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 11

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


Earlier I mentioned that I’d begun studying the Tarot. This was a few years after I’d become accustomed to being haunted. The power to see the future seemed like it might be useful, to say the least. Before long I was sampling the wares of astrology, psychometry, necromancy, channeling, reincarnation, etc. (Palmistry was a non-starter; my eyesight was too bad for scrutinizing those tiny little lines that add detail to the story.) I suppose these interests would qualify me as a card-carrying New Ager. But I don’t like to belong to movements or organizations. Like religion.

I wholly accepted the existence of my grandfather’s ghost. Ergo and indisputably there was an afterlife. What else was true? What else was out there to believe in? It followed that there was connection, and meaning, and creative force welding the cosmos. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I possessed faith. Which put me in the vicinity of religion. Because we might be talking God here. And I wasn’t too comfortable with that.

Until I was 11 I was pretty comfortable with believing that spirits inhabited everything in the natural world: trees, rocks, ocean, moon. And I was ready to be convinced that magic was practicable.

My religious background was scant. Mom, who was handicapped, had her hands full managing five kids, chauffeuring us to different schools and music lessons (we each played two instruments). Like my father, she’d been brought up Episcopalian, but the idea of corralling us children and driving to Sunday services on her one day of reprieve was too much.

She got no help from Dad. He proclaimed himself a devout atheist. A Columbia Law School professor, he was an intellectual, an academic, a man of reason, and besides on Sundays he had papers to grade. When some folks inquired about his faith, he told them he was a Druid, or, “Druish.”

When I was 8 and we moved to another town, our new house happened to be a mere mile from the nearest Episcopal church. In a fit of guilt, Mom decided that, while it might be too late for my older brothers, there was still a chance to inoculate the littler kids against Dad’s atheism. So she drove my younger brother and me to St. Paul’s Church and simply dropped us off, giving us a quarter for the collection basket. The two of us had to go in alone, sit in a pew, and figure it all out.

It was excruciating. We had no idea what the hell was going on. How did people know when to sit, when to stand, what to answer the priest, which page the hymn was on? What was the deal with going to the railing, kneeling, and getting something to eat? It was mid-morning and we were hungry, so one Sunday I dared to join the row of people at the railing and open my mouth when the food came around. The holy wafer was not enough to feed a guppy, and tasteless besides.

After several Sundays of listening to our stomachs growl as we sat confounded in the pews, my brother and I waited for Mom to drive off, then walked a half mile to the penny-candy store, where we spent our collection-money quarter on twenty-five pieces of candy. Then we walked back to the church and were waiting on the stoop when Mom picked us up.

Our religious education didn’t last long. When my mother questioned us about what we’d learned, we were utterly ignorant and had Red Hots on our breath.

Years later I was exposed again to the Protestant faith at prep school, where we attended a brief chapel service every day. A Bible chapter was read by a senior, a song was sung, and off we went to classes. I joined the choir because it did concerts at boys’ schools, but we were also obliged to sing at the full chapel service on Sundays, officiated by a local minister. I enjoyed the music, but there was one image that left a sour taste every time: the sight of the reverend holding the collection plate full of money up to Jesus on the altar cross while we sang praises. (About ten years later, this image would recur in my documentary “Marjoe,” which was about a mercenary evangelist.)

So Dad’s atheism had prevailed through my adolescence. What I did not know, when his father’s ghost began to infiltrate my life, was that Grandpa was a Freemason. Masonry is not a religion in itself. However, it does urge its members to attend the church of their choice faithfully, and so Grandpa attended Episcopal services with some regularity. And when, in my half-dreaming state of the half-dawn, he fed me the last of the songs, it was shot through with music from Episcopalian ritual.

In researching this blog, I’ve also discovered that much of Masonic belief is characterized by the “occult.” All the things I’ve embraced over the course of my life – karma, reincarnation, and even magic – reflect his spiritual views, and it was he who, from the “other side,” first raised the window for me to fly out through.

Grandpa didn’t write poetry, except for one that I found recently among his papers. My jaw just about slammed on the floor when I read it.

When you feel
The nearing presence of the long, long sleep,
Send out your thought to me;
And I shall come, -
I shall come to you. You have not known me in your present life;
Yet you are mine and I am yours…
Someone your living eyes have never seen,
Who draws the something that men name your soul
With sweet familiar call, -
The moment flees, -
Is gone beyond recapture…

‘Tis I, who keep alive that ancient urge
To blend with me, as I with you.
For I am in the gentle wind
And the warm summer rain.
I gleam upon you through the sunset fire.
Softly my whisper
Breathes through the hush that lies upon the world,
In the strange secret hour
Before the dawn…

(To be continued.)

A Personal Remembrance of John Lennon

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


I hadn’t planned on writing another blog today, but someone made me aware that it’s the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I’d like to share a personal story about John that relates to the ghost tale I’ve been telling over the past 10 posts. Those who have been following this saga will remember that in 1974 I visited a psychic named Frank Andrews when I was 27 (see Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3). I was being troubled by a paranormal presence in my parents’ house, and Frank helped me learn more about the ghost’s identity.

It was in this same year that I was dating singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, off and on. John Lennon was in his “Lost Weekend” period, and also producing Harry’s “Pussycats” album. I’d met John before when he first arrived in New York, so I knew him already. John and Harry were stoned to the eyeballs whenever I saw them. The L.A. recording sessions were apparently like a zoo with the cages open.

They both came to New York to mix the record, checking into a two-bedroom suite at the Pierre Hotel. In order to do the work, John was trying to get a handle on his over-indulgence, and even Harry went on a fast (which he ended after 24 hours by ordering up a double Brandy Alexander). John was also trying to get back with Yoko. He was on his best, subdued behavior when she came over to the Pierre and the four of us sat down to a room-service dinner.

John and Yoko seemed rather tentative around each other, so I tried to fill a silence by telling a story that took place only a few nights before. I’d been eating at a sushi bar next to an exquisite young Japanese woman who struck up a conversation with me. For some reason she confided in me that she was Mayor John Lindsay’s mistress. True or not, her descriptions of their rendez-vous made for very entertaining conversation.

At one point the woman suddenly remarked, “Sometimes I am psychic, and I have a feeling that you will be famous.”

I responded: “That’s funny, because a professional psychic just said the same thing to me.”

“Oh yes,” she said, with a weird confidence. “You mean Frank.”

How could she have known that? I wondered to Harry, John, and Yoko.

Yoko interrupted to demand the name of the psychic. She wanted to see him. Immediately.

So I put her in touch with Frank. Yoko went to see him alone; John was too afraid to go (he went later, though). The next time we all had dinner, she reported that Frank had impressed her hugely. But the one prediction he made that struck her the most was a cryptic statement about John: “He sleeps in blood.”

She and John had discussed the meaning of Frank’s words, and both decided he was seeing something from the past, not the future: the blood referred to the miscarriages Yoko had suffered when they were together and trying for a baby.

The image returned to me six years later, when I heard that John had been shot and killed. I pictured him the way Frank must have seen him: lying in his own blood, as if asleep.

‘Night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

At Home With a Ghost - 10

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

I will state at this point that I have never seen a ghost. I neither saw nor heard my grandfather. I think it would have terrified me. That was our deal, from the beginning: that he would do nothing to frighten me in the course of our contacts. Communicating in in that foyer between dreaming and waking was far more productive. When it came to an occasional glass shattering or a door opening by itself, these manifestations were actually kind of welcome. They proved to myself, and to any witnesses present, that I was not making it all up.

But others saw him. One friend who really did see dead people – she became a professional medium a few years later – reported seeing a man with a moustache behind me, and that he stuck his tongue out at her. This would be entirely in character. My grandfather apparently had a juvenile sense of humor; he loved bawdy limericks and potty jokes. One time when my dad visited him in the hospital, the nurse knocked on the door and Grandpa yelled, “Who goes there? Friend or enema?”

Another time he was sighted was in Martha’s Vineyard, six years ago. I was in charge of renting out Grandpa’s old beachfront cottage, the house where he died in 1958. A tenant and his family were in residence for the month of July. Midway through their stay, the father approached me to ask if there was by any chance a ghost in the house.

“Maybe,” I answered evasively. I was surprised because no renters had ever reported any paranormal activity.

He told me about two incidents. In the first, his wife had been alone in the house, puttering about the ground floor, when she plainly heard someone coughing upstairs. She called her son’s name but, upon glancing out the window, realized he was outside on the lawn. By now throughly creeped out, she went outside, grabbed her son and made him go upstairs to look around. There was no one there.

The second incident, which prompted her husband to speak to me, concerned their twentysomething daughter. One evening she was bringing some groceries into the service entrance when she encountered a tall gentleman with a moustache who politely escorted her to the stairs and waited as she opened the door and went inside. His presence was so benign, his demeanor so very nice, that it wasn’t until she put down her bags on the kitchen table that she realized what had happened and freaked out. By then, of course, he had vanished.

I was kind of jealous, to be honest. It felt like he was cheating on me. He was mine. What was he doing, popping in on some complete strangers? Well, I guess he was still the sociable sort he’d been in his lifetime.

The other thing that bothered me was that his behavior, as reported, had been typical run-of-the-mill ghost stuff. There are plenty of reputedly haunted houses on Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquidick, enough so that there are “ghost tours” for the tourists during the summer. Now and then there are sightings of whaling captains’ widows and tavern owners and the like, always associated with a certain place they’re attached to.

But, in spite of the title of this story, in my mind grandpa was a spirit, not a ghost. What’s the difference? I think of ghosts as being the after-image of a human life that has not fully retracted from the mortal world. They cling to place, and often pursue the habitual routines of their former existence. Sometimes they are unaware they can leave. Sometimes they have unfinished business. But they associate with a specific locale or an object.

Spirit, on the other hand, is an elastic filament from the departed soul which can extend from its natural dimension into our dimension, kind of on a visiting basis. Like angels – except with more personality traits, such as a preference for dirty limericks. Grandpa wasn’t stuck to one place. He could turn up anywhere I went (except Morocco, where I really could have used him, but that’s another story).

I have a photograph of my grandfather standing behind my dad, and that’s the way I sometimes picture Grandpa: looming behind me, keeping me company, an advisor, protector, and sometimes a pain in the ass. I can’t see him, but I know he’s got my back.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 9

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


“You need to change the bulb,” he said. The floor lamp across the room was flickering.

“Just ignore it,” I said. The light blinked a few more times, then stopped.

My guest was an actor. Greek lineage, Mediterranean good looks, my type. I forget who drummed him up for me. He had taken the last train from Grand Central to Connecticut, where I was living in a detached studio on my parents’ property, so we both knew he was there to spend the night, even though I had only met him on the phone earlier in the day.

We were drinking a bottle of brandy from my grandfather’s liquor collection, one of the things Grandpa had bequeathed to his son, my dad. The champagnes and wines had long since turned to dreck, but there was still a lot of fine booze from the 30’s and 40’s stored in our garage. For example, there were cases of fantastic bourbon in brown bottles labeled “For Medicinal Purposes Only” – issued by the government during Prohibition.

At this time, I was helping myself to the stash. Drinking was one way of dramatizing my heartache. The love of my life (or, my life up until age 27) had fallen for someone else. I’d tried hard to get him back without success. I wrote a mocking song about him for my second album, and that certainly didn’t work either. I was alone with my anguish. One of the reasons I’d moved back to my parents’, besides to save money, was to lick my wounds in solitude and also to write a lot of songs about heartache.

But sometimes I got horny. Here in the quiet, safe ‘burbs, there were no suitable sex objects I could espy besides delivery boys. (I tried one. He did not deliver.) My friends in the city kept a lookout for me and passed on recommendations. One friend even opened up her little black book and asked me if I wanted Warren Beatty or Michael. J. Pollard. Without saying which one I chose (duh), the result was a new rule: do not date actors.

Actors seem out of phase. They can be right before your eyes but you’re aware of a second image slightly overlapping the other, an image of the character they’re playing. There’s an uncertainty about whom you’re dealing with. Sometimes you feel like you’re there to help them with their lines.

Desperate times demand stupid moves, and so here I sat with an actor on my couch. And now another lamp, on the table beside him, started flickering. “What is it with your light bulbs?” he asked.

Instead of answering him, I addressed the room: “Okay, I know you’re here. You can stop annoying us.”

The actor looked at me with a touch of fear. I was talking to somebody who wasn’t there. Maybe I was delusional. Maybe he had made a mistake by coming. Tough luck, the trains had stopped running.

Whatever the case, I seemed to have an uncanny ability to make bulbs stop flickering, because table lamp was back to normal.

I knew what was really going on: Grandpa didn’t like this guy. My actor didn’t know that he’d just gotten a bad review.

It wasn’t the first or the last occasion that my grandfather would meddle in my sorry affairs. He would make his point by doing something creepy, thus conveying his opinion that these were not appropriate men for me. I agreed with him. No one would ever measure up to the one who broke my heart. I was exploring my freedom to self-destruct. And Grandpa was in the way.

Delaying the inevitable, when I would lead the actor from couch to mattress, I offered to read his Tarot cards. I’d just begun learning how to predict the future and I needed the practice. I asked the actor if he had any questions. Without hesitating, he wanted to know, “Will I become a famous actor?”

I know it was a bit cruel, but I told him what the cards unequivocally said: “No.”

From my point of view, Grandpa had already put a damper on the evening. From the actor’s point of view, after my Tarot reading, the evening was beyond damp: it had drowned.

About 30 years after I put him on the morning train back to New York, I searched for the actor’s credits on Imdb. Minor roles, mostly in TV, petered out around 1997. Guess he didn’t make it.

It’s good to know when it’s better not to know.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 8

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


We talk nowadays about the Cloud. Back when this ghost story takes place, there were no personal computers. But you could say that there I was, in a half-asleep state, downloading music from cyberspace.

The songs came in fragments. I would be aware that these were assignments, to be developed and finished when I was awake. Sometimes I would be afraid of forgetting the material. The musical phrase or a lyric would obligingly repeat and repeat until I’d committed it to memory. Then I was free to wake up, whereupon I’d start work right away, notating the music or jotting the lyrics, eventually building a song around them.

My grandpa’s music, which was written before World War I, had a heavily romantic feel flavored by chromaticism (he idolized Sibelius, a fellow Freemason; they both wrote ceremonial music for the brotherhood, which my grandfather also published). For the most part he wrote art songs for piano and voice, and choral music.

But the music I was channeling from the Cloud didn’t sound like his. It wasn’t that much like mine either. The songs I’d recorded on my two albums for RCA were, loosely speaking, pop songs. While I wrote them initially on the piano, they were meant to be played with electric bass, drums, etc. This new material didn’t fit anywhere. (To see what I mean, you can download one of them, Sleeparound Town, from my website sarahkernochan.com.)

The other weird thing was, they were all in the voices of pre-adolescent kids. Four of them so far.

It was the fifth song that pushed me to the edge. It was the fevered stream of consciousness of a kid sitting through a Protestant Sunday service while remembering the horror movie he’d seen at the Saturday matinee. I received the music in a hopeless jumble, because the horror movie music was threaded together with the church music. The kid identifies with the persecuted monster, a reviled misfit, which he then confuses with the persecuted Christ.

The kid feels like he’s going crazy. And so was I, being stuck inside his psyche. The words to the song came out in a rush after waking, but the music was fiendishly difficult to write. Snippets of hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Turn Back O Man,” or the priest’s call and response, collided with scary Theremin howls. The piano part was beyond my abilities as a pianist, so I had to write out every note slowly, and then write a second keyboard part, which was supposed to be a church organ. Then there was the solo kid, backed by another four voices, kids in the church choir. It took me days to write the score for Creature From the Last Off-ramp.

I was still living at my parents’, though I’d moved my piano and rudimentary two-track recording equipment into an outbuilding a few steps away from their house. The only way I could hear what I’d written was to play or sing each part, bouncing back and forth between the two tracks as I recorded, until all the voices and keyboard parts were layered.

At the end of all that effort, I was crushed. The playback didn’t sound like what I’d heard in my head. I was also making a ferocious racket, banging away on the piano deep into the night, trying to master what I’d written. I got pissed-off calls from my father to for God’s sake go to bed. I could tell that he (a composer, too, remember) thought the music was nerve-flayingly awful. My exhausted appearance didn’t inspire confidence, either. I had a wild-eyed, hypomanic aspect, and I stank of psychosis.

It was too humiliating to see my mom and dad trade anxious glances; they were clearly wondering if I was on drugs or irretrievably wigging out. So I called a halt to the whole enterprise.

No more, Grandpa.

I was done as a medium to his message. I didn’t want to write any more music. What was the point? No one wanted to record, publish, or even listen to a collection of art songs from some 12-year-olds’ point of view.

I was angry and felt used. I’d taken to talking to my grandfather out loud. I told him to back off and leave me alone.

Things calmed down, then. The mad shoveling of song material into my dream state stopped. I titled the score Songs of Puberty and put it away. I would not return to composing for a long while.

Nevertheless, he didn’t leave me alone.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 7

His ring, my way

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


The jeweler ordered Vivian and me not to move. He grabbed a pen flashlight and dropped onto all fours, scouring the floor for the two cat’s eye gems that had vanished from his spatula.

Vivian whispered to me, “Your grandfather doesn’t want you to change the ring.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” I muttered back. “I have better taste than he does.”

I had in mind what the psychic had told me: that Grandpa, when he was alive, was accustomed to having his own way and was easy to work with if you followed along. I thought, well, I’m headstrong, too. I figured that with a ghost, it was the same as with children and pets: you had to establish who’s in charge at the beginning of the relationship; otherwise they will become unruly and scorn your wishes.

The jeweler continued his search of every nook and cranny of his office, even asking us to remove our sandals and brush our skirts. Finally he gave up, looking both desperate and mystified. “It’s very strange. I saw them fall…Maybe you can leave your number, in case they turn up.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll pick out another pair.”

I had him open the tissue to look at the remaining gems, and selected two that matched. They weren’t anywhere near as nice as the missing ones, but I was determined to get this done and show Grandpa who was boss. The jeweler took no chances this time, placing the envelope a millimeter away from the stones and quickly sweeping them inside.

A week later, the ring was ready. I returned with Vivian. We knocked; the jeweler opened the door. His brow was furrowed; he looked thoroughly flummoxed now. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “After you left last time, I took apart everything in the office looking for those stones. I couldn’t understand how they could have disappeared so completely. They were a financial loss to me. Finally I had to let the cleaning crew in to vacuum. Then, just now, a minute before you arrived, I happened to look down at my feet. And there they were – in plain sight, in the middle of the floor.”

He opened his palm, displaying the two missing gems. Then he gave me a look of nervous suspicion. “This isn’t one of those rings, is it?”

“Yup.” I knew what he meant: an heirloom with spooks included. I imagine that jewelers once in a while experience weird stuff when they handle pieces that carry a paranormal attachment. Curses, tragedy, or just mischief.

I knew I could have insisted that he remove the inferior stones to replace them with the original pair I’d chosen, but the jeweler was clearly anxious to be rid of my ring. I didn’t want to tempt more trouble either. I emerged on the street with the band of gold on my middle finger. The diamonds were history, and in their place two nondescript cloudy cat’s eyes flanked the center stone. I’d won.

I wear the ring to this day. It’s discreet, rarely attracting notice, the way I like it. A secret in plain view.

In time I would get used to my grandfather’s attempts at imposing his will on me. His favorite signals of displeasure were breaking glass and making things jump. Or sometimes he would just be reminding me that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

But right now I’d let him have his way with one thing: I would write the music he was pressing upon me. The sooner I completed what it was he wanted me to do, the sooner he would stop plaguing my sleep, funneling melodies and images. He might even go away.

(To be continued.)

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At Home With a Ghost - 6

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

I left the bank with Grandpa’s ring in hand. I felt myself aligned to his spirit now. He’d made me a gift, which I accepted, and in doing so I accepted his presence as my protector. The ring could have been made of brass and paste for all I cared; I felt there was love in it.

When I showed the ring to Mom, she didn’t remember ever seeing it. Then again, she hadn’t been in that safety deposit box since Grandpa died seventeen years ago. I asked if I could appropriate it for the time being. (Meaning, indefinitely. Otherwise known as: forever.) She said that the plan had always been to let each of us children pick one piece from the box when we got married. Two of my three brothers were married already and had each taken something for their wives. Didn’t I want to wait?

Was she kidding? I’d told her a hundred times I was never getting married. A legally binding state-sponsored commitment was anti-romance, and besides it got in the way if you wanted to jump ship. Which was kind of a pattern with me. So no, there was no point in waiting for that happy day that would never come.

In short order, the ring became mine. Next there was the matter of those two pesky diamonds. I wanted to swap them out for a pair of cat’s eyes that would match the center stone. My friend Vivian offered to escort me to the Diamond Exchange in New York, a completely foreign territory where I didn’t speak a word of gemstone. Since Vivian was Jewish and grew up in the garment industry, she was the perfect translator.

And that was how we came to be wandering around the warren of dismal shops in the Exchange, looking for someone who sold cat’s eyes. Nobody did. When we were about to give up, somebody suggested we try a little cubbyhole at the end of a corridor, saying that the owner sold offbeat stones but often wasn’t there. We knocked. No response. We turned to go and almost ran into a narrow little Indian man who had his key out to open the shop’s door. Yes, he had cat’s eyes.

Once inside, he examined Grandpa’s ring, puzzled why I wanted to get rid of two perfectly nice diamonds. They’re not to my taste, I said. He offered to remove the diamonds and put in two cat’s eyes as an even trade. I assumed he was getting the better end of the deal but I didn’t care.

He rooted around a cardboard box until he found the right size of gem, carefully opening a folded tissue on his desk so I could examine my choices. There were about ten of them. Most of the stones were milky and too small to show the hypnotic shifting band of light that characterizes cat’s eyes. But there were two, and two only, of the same green clarity as the center stone: two with the bright vein gliding over the surface.

“I like these two guys.” They were so small I couldn’t pick them up with my fingers, so the man separated them from the others with his little spatula. He gave me a loop so I could see them magnified. Then I was certain: “They’re perfect.”

“Good.” He held a small manila envelope ready as he slipped his spatula under the pair of gems. He lifted them carefully to transfer them to the envelope. As we all watched, the stones sprang up from the blade and disappeared.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 5

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


The attendant in the small local bank brought me a long metal box and withdrew discreetly. I turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid, and beheld the family bling.

I went into shock, recoiling.

I’m not into diamonds, or any faceted jewels. They trumpet their presence, they glare, they garish (garish really should be a verb). Usually anyone who can afford to wear jewels is too old to be calling attention to their decrepit selves. For example, the diamond collar I unwrapped first must have held up somebody’s wattles in the previous century. I pawed through more gaudy stuff, pendants, brooches, thinking it all very ugly and unseemly. I deplore the conspicuous display of wealth. It’s an attitude I got straight from my parents, so it’s worth the digression here to explain.

My Dad was deeply embarrassed by his parents’ affluence. He remembered riding with them to his first day of boarding school in a chauffeured towncar, at the height of the Depression, even though he’d begged them to take the train. His parents didn’t seem to realize that wealth made other people feel bad: resentful, envious, diminished, denied. They were, after all, Republicans.

Almost as bad as their being wealthy, they were indolent. His father didn’t even bother with a college degree, or read anything beyond lurid murder mysteries; he didn’t even compose music much after the war. Instead he played the market a little, ran a vanity music-publishing company, but mostly frequented half a dozen private clubs in New York and three more if you count Tuxedo Park and Martha’s Vineyard.

In reaction to his parents’ lifestyle, Dad made it his mission to pursue the opposite route. He refused any money from them, and threw himself into his studies, earning first a Harvard BA and then a law degree from Columbia. A beloved professor, he taught tirelessly at Columbia Law for the next five decades.

Mom and Dad were both compulsively thrifty. World War II rationing shaped their sense of economy forever. We bought cheap, or we did without. Eventually my father’s teaching career seemed assured. By now they had four children; it was time to buy a house. They bought a piece of land in the ‘burbs and started building a modest house befitting Dad’s income. And then Grandpa died.

Dad, being the only child of an only child, inherited the fraction that remained after his father’s lifetime of hobknobbing. He sold two of the houses but kept the Martha’s Vineyard cottage for rentals. The money he stuck in a bank and then tried to ignore it. We still lived within his income. We kids had no idea we were anything but middle-class. We did get a slightly bigger house out of Grandpa’s bequeathal (a good thing because a fifth child was in the future); and one time we got to go to Europe.

So for me, staring into this safe deposit box was like looking into a bygone, very unreal world that I didn’t feel remotely related to. Mom and Dad weren’t party people. On the rare occasions they did dress up, other than her engagement ring I never saw my mother wear anything but costume jewelry. Not only that, they were Democrats. Socialism good! Excess bad! No wonder my parents hid this shit away and never talked about it. The contents of this box were…Republican. I couldn’t help a shiver of revulsion.

To be fair, Grandpa and Grandma weren’t so into the bling either. Most of the pieces in the safe deposit box came from the generation before: the Belle Epoque. You never see Dad’s parents wearing jewelry in the photos that survive. However, Grandpa clearly liked small, understated pinkie rings. There were five or six of them, and fairly alike, so maybe he bought Grandma a few that matched his. At any rate, I was looking for a ring, and these didn’t call to me.

But the last one did. The center stone was a cat’s eye, a stone I’d never seen before: pale green, cloudy like a moonstone, with a vertical vein like a cat’s iris that shifted as you moved the ring, similar to a portrait whose eyes follow you.

Too large for my pinkie, it fit nicely on my middle finger. It was totally cool, and very inconspicuous – except for two tiny diamonds that flanked the cat’s eye. As I’ve said, I don’t like diamonds. But they could be removed.

Or so I thought.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 4

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

The only person privy to my haunting was my friend Vivian, who had sent me to the psychic in the first place, and who had no trouble believing my story. She had long claimed to be, God love her, a white witch. So anything of a paranormal nature gave her a boner, so to speak.

“What about the ring?” Vivian pestered me without cease. “He said there’s a ring for you somewhere!”

The road to that information led once again back to the parents. I still quailed at the thought of telling my dad what was behind my sudden interest in his father. Consider what was in the balance: either the ghost did exist or I was psychologically in deep trouble. I wasn’t even sure myself. But my mother could be relied upon to give me tons of slack; within the family, she was known to be fantastically gullible.

When I finished telling her, Mom was silent. Her face carried an expression I’d never seen before. Then she related her own story – or rather, it was her father’s story. He had told it to her in strict confidence. But this seemed like the appropriate occasion to bring it to light.

At this point I should insert the title “The Other Grandfather.”

My mother's background was similar to my father's, both raised in old-money wealth. Born in 1920, she grew up on a huge estate in Chicago. She and her four siblings were raised by a string of governesses (there was high turnover). Her mother had zero interest in mothering. Once, when Grandma didn’t want to deal with Mom coming home from boarding school for the holidays, she had her daughter delivered to a hospital to have both her tonsils and appendix removed. Her children marinated in constant uncertainty; you never knew where you stood with her. She seemed only intermittently engaged by their presence; she had an air of absence.

Mom’s father was physically absent much of the time, first serving in World War I, then serving as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, then running the European Red Cross during World War II, then serving as Truman’s Under Secretary of Commerce. My mother had a hardcore case of hero worship - and who can blame her. I chiefly remembered him for his ubiquitous glass of whiskey, his chain of unfiltered Camels, and his rumbling cough (he died of emphysema eight years before this conversation took place).

His own mother (hope I’m not confusing you here) died when he was a young man. He had been very close to her. He missed talking to her. Around the time he fell in love with my grandmother, he was working very hard and late into the nights. One night his attention strayed from the page he was writing on; it was the wee hours, and he was exhausted, starting to lose focus. And then his right hand, with its pencil paused on the paper, started to move. Of its own accord, as if separate from him, it started writing. He watched his hand in dazed fascination as the words formed, in a script that was all too familiar to him. The handwriting was not his own, but his mother’s. She was talking to him.

He became hooked on nightly bouts of “automatic writing," communicating with his mother. She comforted his feelings of loss. She encouraged him in his ambitions. When he asked for advice, she gave wise counsel, just as she always had when she was alive...until the night when he asked her about a fascinating girl who had beguiled his heart. He wanted to propose to her. What did dear Mater think of her?

His mother replied that it would not be a good match. Contrary to his own nature, the girl was irresponsible and spoiled. Ultimately he would not be happy.

He was shocked by her reply. It was not what he wanted to hear. In that moment, he realized what he was doing, that he was in thrall to a dead person whose power over him increased with every night he sought her company. What he had allowed to happen was utter madness. That very night, he broke it off. Not with his fiancée, but with his mother. Never again did he petition the “other side” for comfort, love, or sustenance. For that he would go to his wife.

Mom’s implication, in telling this story, was that in the end her father didn’t get much of comfort, love or sustenance from that corner. The marriage indeed disappointed him, and became part of the reason for his long absences. (After his death she, who had never learned to economize, blew through his entire fortune.)

It occurs to me as I write this that I got the ghost from one grandfather, and the receptivity from the other.

My mother had held this secret for a long time. Who would believe it anyway? This account came from a man who was the opposite of fanciful, a wielder of facts and figures: in short, a man of the world and not the beyond. Mom believed him because he was her father whose every word was golden.

Thus she had no problem believing I was being contacted by a family member who happened to be deceased. If I was crazy, that would mean her dad was crazy, an impossible thought to entertain.

So when I asked Mom if there was an old ring passed down to us, her response was immediate. She gave me the key to a safe deposit box.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 3

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

“Why?” My father looked at me skeptically when I asked him for a photo of his dad. I couldn’t very well tell him I was in communication with his father’s ghost. And I’d never before shown any interest in my grandfather. Maybe because Dad didn’t talk about him much.

Dad still resented both parents. They had fobbed him off on nannies from the time he was born. Once they even left him for months with a strange couple in Italy while they blithely toured Europe. They were emotionally restrained; my grandmother wouldn’t greet him or give him a kiss whenever he came home from school because she was afraid he’d become a mamma’s boy. They stuck him in St. Mark's boarding school when he was only 12. He was passionate about music, and Grandpa provided him with the piano and teachers but never gave him a word of encouragement when he started to compose seriously. Dad once said, “Why did they have me if they didn’t want to be around me?” He became estranged from his mother, finally, when he was in his twenties and mentioned that he was going to an analyst. His mother hit the roof. “You can’t do this to our family! People will think you’re crazy!” They had a falling out; possibly he pointed out that he had to go to a shrink because of his parents’ utter failure to be parents.

So he wasn’t that happy to dig up a picture of his father for me. I told him lamely that I was just, um, interested in Grandpa, without giving a reason. Dad gave me what I wanted, and off I went to Frank Andrews, the psychic, for a second visit.

I started to give Frank the photo when he stopped me: “Don’t tell me anything, and put the photo face down.”

He started off by describing the man in the photo without having seen him. I still have my notes from this session: “Sloping forehead, hair receding on either side, used to be thicker.” He got that right, judging from the headshot I’d brought. But I had no way to corroborate the rest: “Beautiful hands, long tapering fingers, with a big puff of Venus [the part under the thumb]. He has a Mercury forehead – all mind, too fast a thinker. Used to having his own way but easy to work with if you’re doing it his way.”

Frank looked up. “I see him darting, pacing, agitated around you. Impatient. You’ll get signs, like things falling off the wall, or he’ll steal things. Do you know his birthdate?” I didn’t. “I’m getting that he was a Sagittarius, Gemini rising. Healthwise, his heart was his weak spot. I’m surprised he got married because he was an independent sort. He was buried with a ring. Another ring of his will appear in due time. Did he have an east coast retreat, in the Cape Cod area?” That much I could confirm. We had gone as a family to Grandpa’s beach house in Martha’s Vineyard after he died, a trip I remembered very well because we got trapped in a major hurricane. “You should go there,” said Frank. “Something’s there for you.” Oh yeah, I wondered, whatever happened to that house?

At length I blurted out my problem: that I was being bombarded by music before waking and I didn’t know what it was for. My recording career was over and I wasn’t performing anymore. I’d stopped writing songs – until now.

Frank said, “When he was alive, he was working on a long piece like an operetta, which he never completed. He wants you to complete a similar type of piece, kind of like Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. And then he might go.”

“Might?” I look at these notes now, and I have to laugh at the “might” part. Because he did go…but then he came back. He goes and he comes back, still to this day.

It’s 36 years later and I’m still stunned how accurate Frank’s reading was. Some of it I could corroborate when I got home afterwards and got my Dad to talk a little about his father. I found out Grandpa’s birth date. Yes, he was a Sagittarius. No birth time was recorded so the Gemini rising wasn’t verifiable, but he certainly sounded, from Dad’s description, like a quick-witted, impatient, dominating man. As for the physical characteristics, you can see for yourself from this photo of Dad with his parents:

Grandpa did get married later in life, age 37, after a lot of clubbing and partying. And he did die of a heart attack – in the Martha’s Vineyard house, in fact, while he was getting dressed to go out for yet another night of carousing with his rich WASP mates.

Some other details given by Frank took longer to confirm. I’ll write about the ring later. But things like Grandpa’s hands: Frank had described pretty much what my dad’s hands looked like, so I figured he got them from his dad. None of the other pictures I ever saw showed my grandfather’s hands. It wasn’t until 2008, a year after my dad died, that I finally saw them. We had just sold Dad’s house, and my brother and I were clearing out the attic when we came upon a decrepit oil portrait of Grandpa. He was seated in front of his piano. A cigarette dangled between his beautiful, very long and slim tapering fingers. They looked like a cast of Chopin’s hands I once saw in a Paris museum: made for playing music. And there was a handsome ring on his pinkie.

And the house on Martha’s Vineyard? There was something there for me after all. But I didn’t get it until ten months ago. I was finally able to buy the house next door.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - 2

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)

My grandfather was a composer and music publisher. He was also, according to the New York Times, one of the wealthiest young bachelors in New York, and very social, belonging to a host of exclusive clubs plus the Freemasons. Thus his output as a composer (mostly songs and choral music) was relatively small. It reduced to a trickle after he served in World War I, married my grandmother in Paris, and returned to a life of hobnobbing and carousing, dividing his time among his three homes. Soon after they were married, my grandparents got the son-and-heir thing over with by begetting my father and then turning him over to the household staff and a string of governesses.

My father, too, wanted to be a composer when he was in his twenties. Like his father, he too retreated from composing after serving in World War II. Instead he became a professor of law at Columbia and raised a family. I became the next generation of composer in the family in my mid-twenties, when I landed a recording deal with RCA as a singer-songwriter. My first album, House of Pain, came out in 1974. I had composed most of the songs for my second (Beat Around the Bush) when I had my first encounter with Grandpa’s ghost.

I mention my musical provenance because, not long after I opened myself to communicating with him, I began to receive fragments of music in my dreams. I would be on my way to waking, in that twilight between states of consciousness, when a phrase or snatch of melody would come, along with an urgency: memorize this so you can recreate it when you wake up. The figure would repeat and repeat until I had it down. Upon waking, I would go directly to the piano and pick out the notes, transferring all to music notation paper and then building a song on them. It was a bit like taking dictation, except that once I started fashioning the song it became my own.

Sometimes instead of music I would be shown a story for the basis of a song. For example, right before waking I witnessed a scene unfolding between a pre-adolescent girl and her new stepfather in his study. I even got his name; she called him Mr. Sloane. (The resulting song can be downloaded from my website sarahkernochan.com.) It was a feverish time, as if I was on speed. Sleep became work from which I would awake to more work, the borders dissolving between conscious and unconscious. I knew where these directives were coming from. I had opened the door, after all. But the increasing force of creative imperative started to frighten me. I felt like I was being blown around in a gale.

I was also feeling more than a little crazy. There was no one to talk to. My shrink admitted she didn’t believe in ghosts and kept trying to link these episodes to my early life, especially to my relationship with my father. And I was totally reluctant to talk to my dad, because my dream-time interlocutor was his deceased father, or so I believed. Dad was also an avowed atheist who often said that death was the end, period, and nothing followed.

I called the psychic, Frank Andrews. “You told me I have a spirit around me, a man whom I knew when he was alive. I’ve figured out he’s my grandfather, and I need some advice now.” Frank said, “Don’t tell me any more. Come back to see me, and bring a picture of him.”

Great. The only way to get a picture of Grandpa was to ask my father for one.

(To be continued.)

At Home With a Ghost - Part 1

It always amuses me to listen in on people debating whether or not ghosts exist. For me, there’s no debate. I have one.

When I was 27 I didn’t believe in life after death. The proof just wasn’t there for me. In that same year, on the recommendation of a friend, I visited a psychic (Frank Andrews) for the first time. I had a problem.

I had moved out on my boyfriend and was temporarily without digs, spending nights in an upstairs guest room at my parents’. I’d never used this room before, but after I went to college my old bedroom had been taken over by my dad as a study. I didn’t sleep well from the beginning in this unfamiliar room. I would start to fall asleep, and then strange things would happen: sounds like something rolling across a wood floor (the room was completely carpeted) or once I had the sensation my head was in someone’s lap who was stroking my head. Another time, I felt my toes being yanked sharply, as if someone was impatiently demanding my attention. I was frightened, and didn’t know where to turn for help. A friend suggested I see this psychic.

Towards the end of the reading, and without my prompting, he mentioned there was a spirit around me. “It’s male, and you knew him. Don’t worry,” the psychic said, “he’s protective.”

I returned to the guest room without fear, and was able to identify, from clues in the room, exactly who my ghost was. In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t see it right away.

My grandfather was not someone I remembered much of. We didn’t see him that often. I recall his knees and his fancy cane. I recall the circus he sent us tickets to. I recall his house in New York City. He died when I was eight.

But here in this room were his furniture, his books, his portrait, and a bas-relief of his family crest. My parents had stashed all these things up in this guest room to keep them out of harm’s way (we were five rowdy children and a couple of dogs).

The question remained: why me? Why was he trying to make contact with me? I stood and addressed the room: “I know who you are now. I’ll try not to be afraid anymore, if you find some way to communicate with me that doesn’t frighten me as you’ve been doing. I’m open to knowing what it is you want from me.”

Thus began a relationship between a family phantom and myself, which has endured, off and on, until the present.

HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part Three: Production

These days publishers are so impoverished that not only do they expect all but the most prominent writers to pay for their own editor and publicist, to blog and flog their book on the internet, but also to provide their own promo videos for YouTube. Consequently agencies and marketing companies spring up overnight, offering their services to indie authors, to edit, package, publicize – on the author’s dime, of course. Extra services include producing promo videos for a fee. One company is even offering to have some out-of-work screenwriter adapt your book into a screenplay, leaving you with the problem of getting an unsolicited script to film producers.

Authors traditionally live hand to mouth. Published writers hence become those who can afford it. It’s almost a reflection of the rich-to-poor gap that afflicts our country. But back to my subject: how can you produce an affordable video to promote your book? You’ve already written the script (see previous post), which cost nothing. Where do you go from here, if your script is more ambitious than titles on a black screen?

Here’s what I did. As it happened, I’d been commuting to Boston each week to teach advanced screenwriting for a few semesters at Emerson College. I got acquainted with the producing, acting, directing and cinematography faculty. When the time came to make my video, I called the cinematography teacher Harlan Bosmajian for a favor, asking him to shoot the promo. He in turn asked some of his students to fill the other camera crew positions. I called the producing teacher and asked her to recommend a talented student. I went with one of the volunteers, Julie Hook, a junior, who put together casting sessions (using student and local actors), location manager, production designer, sound recordist and editor, all from the student body. (I’ve directed 3 films before, so I didn’t need a director.) The equipment came from the school’s stock.

Everyone was happy to work for free, because being part of a commercial production would look great on their “reel.” Their abilities were still in the formative stage, and mistakes on set were made, but YouTube promos are not expected to be slick. I had to rent the van, pay the location fee, and provide pizza for the crew and talent. Thus the video would have only cost a few hundred dollars if I hadn’t insisted on paying everyone a nominal amount each.

My point is, if you live anywhere near a school with a film production program, and you’re willing to take a chance on young developing talent, you can make an affordable video. Putting up a notice on the bulletin boards or online is sufficient to attract able and eager people who want to put their education into practice. And they often have an astounding command of the technology and software. Particularly my 20-year-old editor, Alfonso Carrion, was amazing at rendering the graphics and the animation I needed for the second half of my trailer.

There are books that deal with all the other options, in greater detail, for making book trailers. This was my experience, and I’m very proud of the result. See for yourself:



There was no room for a credits crawl at the end, so I’m printing their names here, with fervent thanks for their contribution.

Producer – Julie Hook
Director of Photography – Harlan Bosmajian
Sound Recordist – Molly Young
Alfonso Carrion - Editor
Electric – Matt Figler
Assistant Camera – Lowell Meyer
Grip – Dan Finlayson
Production Design – Devynne Lauchner
Role of Jane played by – Eliza Earle
Role of Brett played by – Nat Sylva

HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part Two: The Script

(For Part 3 of this series click here.)

Your trailer is an ad for a story. It’s a story that exists on the page only. Though it lacks visuals, it still has a plot, a mood, characters and events. (Note: I’m limiting this topic to fiction). Thus your book offers the same basic experience as a movie. And so this promo should be approached as if you are selling a movie. Studying different types of film trailers will show you the rhythm of the editing, the importance of sound effects and music, and the difference between trailers for drama, thrillers and comedy.

Before you write the script for your trailer, please consider these three points.

Can we agree on one thing? Novels are meant to provoke. You’re prodding a certain response from the reader. What is the reaction you want to provoke in your book? Really think about this. Maybe you want the reader to laugh and have fun, or quiver with fear, be spiritually uplifted, or feel exquisite melancholy. So your trailer should give a hint, a promise, of that experience. For example, when writing my script for the Jane Was Here promo, I wanted to give the viewer the same feeling of eerie creepiness and foreboding that my book does. And accomplish all that in two minutes.

Item two: Obviously you want to create curiosity, too. As in a movie trailer, at the end of two minutes the viewer should want to see more.

Item three: find the movie in the book. Many writers fantasize about their books being made into films. What scenes stand out to you as most dramatic (that don’t contain spoilers)? Is there one scene or moment that can stand alone in representing the whole book? For example, when I wrote my book Jane Was Here, I tried to capture the reader in the early pages with one scene that I knew would awake tantalizing questions. A mysterious young woman calling herself Jane shows up in a small town, knocks on a door, and announces that this is her house. She says she was born and grew up here. Yet she’s never been here before in her life. How is that possible? Who is Jane? What’s she looking for? Why is she so weird? What happened to her in this house long ago? Is she dangerous? Since this scene succeeded in hooking readers in the book, it became the natural choice for the trailer.

If you have more than one scene from the book you want to use, you probably do not have time for both within two minutes. Hence you are now in montage territory. Most trailers are made up of short snatches anyway.

What images and/or sounds best represent your book? Are there motifs? Look how the promo for Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader uses motifs to make you want to know more:


The motifs here are lace, and a key. (Note: black-and-white photography is a clever choice her because it subtly establishes Barry’s book as classy not cheesy. Music videos often do this to make a song seem artier.)

Having pondered the above three points, you’re ready to make a stab at writing the first draft of your trailer script. Let yourself go and don’t worry whether your chosen scene or montage is practical on a budget. Write as if your book has already been made into a movie and you’re giving a taste of the goodies a moviegoer can expect. Avoid static or still images unless you plan to program some camera movement in the editing stage (indicate what kind of moves in your script). Play my trailer below, and you’ll see an illustration that isn’t static because I start close on one detail and then continually pull out until the picture transforms into something different.

Now add the hype.

Repeat the title at least twice, even better three times, to get it in the viewers’ heads. If you have any quotes that reduce to a few words (“gripping,” “hilarious beyond belief”) flash them at intervals.

Plan to show the book cover’s title graphic, too. (A caveat: using the whole cover is a little harder because a book is a vertical oblong and a film image stretches horizontally, so you can’t get the cover to fill the screen. Anyway, you deal with that problem in editing.)

Consider movie-trailer-style voice-over if you know someone or can cast someone with a professional-sounding voice. “A man. A woman. A building on fire. Only one will get out.” Don’t do voice-over yourself unless you are offering a personal narrative, as in a memoir: “The day I found out I had cancer...”

When you have a first draft, it should be like a wish list. Now it’s time to get real. If your book is a historical epic, then maybe you’ve done a montage of battle scenes. If it’s sci-fi fantasy, your scenes or images are heavy in special effects. You know perfectly well that to shoot these would cost millions of dollars.

But don’t rule them out. See if you can translate these scenes into a montage of snippets from other movies. Let’s go back to the example of a battle scene montage. You can grab these images from other war films or archival footage, off DVDs or whatever: quick shots of pounding horse hooves, swords slicing through the air, or explosions and planes taking off, airships landing. Capturing film clips is standard in this YouTube age. Just don’t use iconic or easily recognizable images from famous films, like the blood gushing down the hotel corridor in The Shining. Go to the more obscure B-list movies, or foreign films, or flops. Also don’t show recognizable actors’ faces. This announces you’ve stolen the material, and you want this to look as original as possible.

Suddenly your ambitious first-draft now looks affordable.

If you have a comedy or drama which best engages a viewer by showing a scene or two from the book, then you’re going to have to shoot your trailer with actors in a studio or on location. With Jane Was Here, I chose a two-person scene, with a Victorian house exterior. Very affordable. In the next post I’ll get into the technical production aspect of a trailer shoot. In the meantime, by way of example, below is the final script plus the finished trailer for Jane Was Here.






LOCATION: SMALL TOWN IN NEW ENGLAND. STREET WITH SMALL VICTORIAN HOUSE. NIGHT.





INT. FOYER - HOUSE - 3 A.M. - HOT SUMMER NIGHT

CLOSE-UP ON a frosted, etched PANEL IN THE FRONT DOOR. A
SHADOW APPEARS behind the glass. The SHAPE OF A HEAD comes
closer. A HAND on the pane. Then a knuckle RAP-RAP-RAPS.

CUT TO:
COVER GRAPHIC OVER BLACK:
JANE WAS HERE

A NOVEL BY

SARAH KERNOCHAN

FOOTSTEPS APPROACH. SOUND OF KNOB TURNING....

CUT TO:

SAME ANGLE ON DOOR PANEL as it SWINGS OPEN to reveal:

A YOUNG WOMAN, about 22, standing in the street outside this
decrepit Victorian house. She wears grimy sneakers and
clamdiggers, and carries a small duffel. Pale, thin, with
lank tangled hair, she has the childish face of a waif.

JANE
Hello, sir.

She looks up pleadingly at:

REVERSE ANGLE

BRETT, 28, tall, awkward and a touch nerdy, stands in the
doorway. He's dead tired from being up all night working.

BRETT
(wary)
Hi. Can I help you?

YOUNG WOMAN
I'm Jane.

BRETT
Yes. Are you looking for someone?

JANE
This is my house.

BRETT
I've rented it for the summer. I
don't know the owner, are you
related?

She shakes her head solemnly, speaking in a curiously prim,
old-fashioned manner.

JANE
I don't know anyone in this town.
Yet I feel sure, I was born here,
in this very house. And then...
something happened to me. I can't
remember. Sir, may I come in?

BRETT
(annoyed)
Jane, it's three a.m. Come back in
the daytime.

He starts to close the door, but she pushes against it.

JANE
Please - please! I have nowhere
else to go!

Surprised, he pauses. She gazes up at him desperately.

JANE (CONT'D)
I am looking for myself.

CUE UP SPOOKY MUSIC AND...

CUT TO:

OVER BLACK:

WHO IS JANE?

ANIMATION - LINE CROSSES OUT "IS" AND WRITES OVER IT:

WAS

WHO IS JANE?

CUT TO:





CU 19TH CENTURY WOMAN SEATED BEFORE MIRROR. BEGIN SLOWLY
PULLING BACK...

CAMERA FINISHES PULL BACK. IMAGE IS NOW SEEN AS A DEATH'S
HEAD.

CUT TO:

OVER BLACK: QUOTES FLY TOWARD CAMERA: "EERIE" - "HAUNTING" -
"TERRIFYING" - "KEPT ME UP AT NIGHT" - "SEDUCTIVE" -
"CHILLING" - "NOTHING SHORT OF MAGIC"

CUT TO:





OVER BLACK: ZOOM SLOWLY TOWARD TITLE "JANE WAS HERE"

CUT TO:

RECAP JANE CLOSE-UP:

JANE
I am looking for myself.

CUT TO:

FRONT COVER SHOT. AVAILABILITY, WEBSITE, ETC.

SUPER:

Coming June 2011

MUSIC ENDS.

For Part 3 of this series click here.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND THE SPIRIT WORLD

Up until the time I entered middle school, that murderer of illusions, I believed in spirits of the air, sea, and earth. My family home was a rocky plot on a lagoon, so all three categories were at hand. The stones were enchanted and had names. There was definitely a spirit in each tree: I visited them, making regular tours of the ones whose low branches let me climb them. When I swam, I could feel the Nyads gliding all around me. The wind whispered in a secret language. Later, and not surprisingly, I was introduced to Greek myths and beliefs, which only confirmed my fantasies.

I’ve been a freelance writer since I was 21. Okay, I’ll let you in on the math: that’s 42 years of pushing the pen. I’ve only once (age 18) held a nine-to-five job. Sometimes I was without work, but I kept writing anyway while the wheel turned, until opportunities arose again. I had a blind trust that it would all work out if I hung in there. And it did. Until two things happened...

To read the rest on Huffington Post, click here.

And thanks to the folks at Red Room for hooking me up with HuffPo! This is a really outstanding site for authors, if you like personal service.

HOW TO MAKE A BOOK VIDEO TRAILER Part One: The Author Video

As most authors know by now, a book’s debut must be accompanied by two videos: the author interview and the trailer. The following, which I’ll post in 3 parts, is what I learned from making my own videos for Jane Was Here (both are below). Compared to a trailer, the author interview is straightforward.

Your location should be your living room or workspace. People want to see your real-life environment and not some featureless backdrop. Whether natural or artificial, make sure there’s good light from two sources (one to fill in the shadows created by the other). You can shoot with anything from a DVR to a flipcam or cell phone. Sometimes a down-and-dirty quality has its own charm. You can edit with a simple software program like iMovie.

The one area that might benefit from a more professional approach is sound. USING THE IN-CAMERA MIKE WILL MAKE THE author’s voice sound too distant if you are shooting from a medium (waist-up) angle. Also, if you shoot both medium and close angles (and you should), the sound level will vary, making it impossible to mix in the edit. So invest in a wireless lavalier mike.

And have a mirror on hand to refresh your makeup and pat down stray hairs which will catch the light.

I decided to do a practice run by shooting an interview video for my first book, Dry Hustle, which had just been re-issued as an ebook. I asked a friend to be a one-man crew since he had all the needed equipment. Then it was up to me to produce the “content.” I wrote a script, even though the interview was supposed to seem off-the-cuff. The idea, simply, was to make people curious to read the book. Dry Hustle was a sexy saga about two con-women, so that meant hyping the raunch, and that the novel was based on real characters.


The script also had to be only 2-3 pages long, figuring on a minute per page. You don’t want your video to be longer or it won’t hold the interest of ADD YouTubers.

I’m not an actress, plus my memory is riddled with holes, so I couldn’t expect to memorize and deliver the whole speech from beginning to end without breaking down. I divided my script into short sections and shot each separately as a single take, then shooting the same section in close-up, until I had one decent take in both angles and, if possible, a second take as “safety.” I made a lot of mistakes, but we could cut around them by switching to the other angle.

By the time we made the author video for Jane Was Here I’d learned a lot. For one thing, I now knew I was uncomfortable speaking directly to the lens like a newscaster. For Jane I felt better looking slightly to the side of the lens. It felt more like I was talking to my friend, the only other person in the room. I couldn’t actually look at him because he was standing behind the camera so I would have had to look up, which can look truly strange when you watch the result. I’d advise others to place a friend on a low stool with his or her head positioned on as close as possible to the lens, and eyes on the same level.

I ‘d also learned that, to keep the viewer’s attention, I needed to cut away from my talking head at intervals. Fortunately, Jane Was Here had already garnered some great advance quotes, so I inserted them at regular beats when we edited.

The last improvement was the use of music. Cleverly chosen music is the best way to establish the tone of your book. I grabbed some fragments of a movie soundtrack which sounded a bit like the “Exorcist” theme. By association, it conveyed the creepy, ominous ambience of my novel, which is a paranormal mystery with a horrific ending.

The edit was pretty easy, with the music being the most time-consuming element. We had to use passages where the music was subdued and quiescent for the shots of me talking, and then seamlessly bridge to more muscular spooky music cues whenever we went to the review quotes on a black screen.



The end result cost me nothing. You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds in making you eager to fork up $20 for a hardcover or $9.99 for download. Next post, I’ll talk about my experiences and offer some advice on the really fun part: making the trailer. For Part 2 click here.

SCREENPLAY VS. NOVEL – PART TROIS

Finishing up from the previous blog, I offer some more differences between writing screenplays and novels.

Very few people will read your script. After friends and partners, you have your agent, manager, executives, producers. Maybe 50-60 people. If it gets produced, then actors, casting agents, designers and technicians will then read it – an average of 100 people. A lot of these people actually hate reading scripts (I know I do). So that’s your reading public.

With a published novel, you can realistically hope that far more than 100 people will read what you wrote. To a screenwriter, this is intoxicating.

You own your novel. You don’t own your script once you sell it.

A novel is quiet. In a typical screenwriter contract, you have 3 months of quiet as you write the first draft and then the noise begins: otherwise called feedback, notes or “thoughts.” Mind you, some notes actually do help the script. But more often they range from unworkable to insane.

With a novel, you can have years of quiet. This may be more solitude than some writers want. I revel in it. There will be changes tactfully requested (instead of demanded) by agent, editor and publisher, but you are still the one to decide to implement their advice or not.

When film professionals read your script, they are deciding whether to do it or not. Your story represents one, ten, fifty, in a few cases a hundred million dollars to be spent. It doesn’t matter how great your writing is, but what’s it going to cost? A page is a minute of screen time. 125 pages are too long. A producer will ask you to cut 20. A director will rewrite the opening – or the whole thing. An actress wants to improvise her dialogue in stead of saying what you wrote, or an actor wants you to make his part bigger than his co-star’s. Everybody’s got a hand in. And then if you don’t succeed in delivering what they want…

When you’re a novelist they can’t replace you with another writer.

Writing Jane Was Here I experienced a kind of autoerotic pleasure from just writing for myself. I could go on at any length, take as long as I wanted, and glory in a wealth of words, knowing there would be no crowd of people waiting to interfere.

Now comes the challenge of enticing readers. Who will spark to Jane, a reincarnation-themed paranormal-mystery-suspense-thriller? Next blog: creating the book trailer.

SCREENPLAY VS. NOVEL – PART DEUX

Following up on my previous blog, here’s more on the difference between writing novels and screenplays.

Some years after my first novel Dry Hustle was published in 1977, I decided to master the film script form so that I could make a decent living. It was time to settle down to one thing; my twenties were all about trying on as many hats as possible: documentary filmmaker, recording artist, novelist (I even squeezed in a musical). I sold a screenplay pitch to MGM, and off I went. That was 30 years ago, and I’m still working. But in contrast to film people who say, “What I really want to do is direct,” I was often heard to say, “What I really want to do is write – books.”

So I embarked on my new novel Jane Was Here with trepidation. I worried that the terse, mechanical style of scripts had rotted away my ability to flow with the narrative form. And in ‘the business,’ a screenwriter has three months to write a 110-pages first draft, so you don’t spend much time weeding and polishing action prose. But in a novel, you can’t write, “GUNSHOT O.S…PAN TO WOMAN (MARY, 30’s) sticking a pistol in purse. She’s beautiful, sexy: think Natalie Portman.” Instead you have to describe the action in beguiling, original prose, free of the cliches you always dispensed freely because film people are comfortable, even reassured by them. You have to slow down and make use of descriptive language, and suddenly there’s a bewildering array of words to choose from, countless ways to move characters around instead of “She exits.”

Vocabulary: I once used the word “obdurate” in a script. Before submitting it, my manager called me to say I couldn’t use it, no one would know what it means. I felt really sad. I had to consign so many words to this inner oubliette (definitely a taboo word) where they would never see the light of day. Imagine the freedom I felt when writing Jane Was Here: I could release them all from this dungeon. I could now use “adipose,” “nacreous,” “caesura,” “arrant,” and – oh frabjous day! – “obdurate.”

There’s little difference between film scripts and novels in terms of dialogue, although the screenwriter will probably be more efficient. In scripts you have to refine dialogue so that a scene doesn’t go longer than 5 pages at the most. Playwrights and novelists’ characters can yammer on endlessly.

Writing screenplays taught me how to plot. In any writing course I ever took in college, we were never taught how to manipulate the long-form story. I studied with the great Grace Paley, who only wrote short stories. “Life is too short, and Art is too long,” she said. I got the feeling that plot wasn’t necessary and even a bit meretricious (do not ever use that word in a script).

My first novel had a great premise but the plot was mostly episodic, with no real rise and fall to the story. When I turned to writing scripts, it didn’t take long to discover I was woefully deficient in this area. I had to teach myself how to deliver an adventure, with twists, turns, curveballs, “misdirects,” and a satisfying of an ending. It served me very well when it came time to design the mystery-paranormal-suspense-thriller that is Jane Was Here.

And then there’s the length. You’re limited in pages to the screen-time of a feature (100 minutes and up). It’s very manageable. A novel, on the other hand, is harder. It accrues to 200 pages and counting. After 200 you can’t even remember what you wrote before – there’s a point where you feel lost at sea.
But that’s the story of, that’s the glory of, books.
Next blog: Screenplays Vs. Novels - Part Trois.

PAGING 'JANE'

People often ask me what it's like to write a novel after 30 years of writing screenplays. But even more often they ask, "Why?" Why leave a job being paid, and paid well, for writing 100 pages in three months? Sometimes you're even paid a ridiculous sum by the week, hanging around the set until someone needs a quickie rewrite. And how about the thrill of seeing your name writ huge on the screen; of knowing that hundreds of people and beaucoup bucks were employed to manifest your crazy ideas?

Let's be frank. Business is slow now in movieland. An aging writer, and a woman at that, is routinely passed over for any genre except romantic comedy. There's plenty of work in indies - better quality and infinitely more rewarding than studio projects, and even at the low pay scale you can make a good living by saying yes to everything and stacking your plate with assignments.

But there's also a very disturbing new trend right now: a lot of producers ask you to write for free (on spec), and your reps actually encourage you to do it. So if you're going to work for nothing, why not write what you really want to?
And I really wanted to write a novel. The last one I wrote (Dry Hustle) was published in 1977, before I got sidetracked into scriptwriting and documentaries. During all those 35 years, I waited to get the one book idea that would seize me so hard I couldn't not write it, because writing long-form fiction requires not just stamina but mania. Instead, over and over the ideas that sprang to my head were for films. I despaired that I was irreversibly condemned to the movie rut with my one good trick. No matter that people envied me for it. All I had ever wanted since the age of 14 was to write books.
My husband and I routinely spend summers at a family home in Martha's Vineyard. We are not on vacation: there is always a lot of writing to be done. Summer of  2006 was the first time I happened not to have a script job.  If I have nothing to write, I have no idea what to do with myself.  I'm gloomy, snarky, and captious. I develop weird unconscious habits like squeezing my face.

And then I got the Idea, and the idea was Jane. A crime is committed and remains hidden for 150 years. All those involved have long since died - and been reincarnated in the present. They remember nothing of their past lives. They are all lured as if by cosmic appointment to the town where the crime occurred. In walks the victim, Jane, with a fragmentary memory of what happened in 1853. And karma settles the rest.

I experienced such forward thrust when I got the idea that I couldn't even wait to outline the story. I simply began. The characters coalesced faster than I could write. The plot thickened so rapidly that I myself was rooted to the page, wondering what would happen next. Script jobs interfered. Ordinarily grateful for work, I bristled at being taken away from the book. After three years of only being able to work on Jane Was Here in my spare time, I announced to my reps that I was taking a leave, a dangerous thing to do in the film business because everyone forgets about you. But I finished the book, then went back and rewrote most of it. Blood, sweat and tears? Nah. Pure joy, all the way, every day.

So when people ask "Why?" I say that, like Jane, I'm coming home again.

JANE WAS HERE book trailer HD

Reincarnation and Evil

My friend Ron Rosenbaum has written a “single” or short take for Kindle called Rescuing Evil. At $1.99, there is so much profound reflection packed into this essay that one must read it again and again, in my case obsessively. (One also prays that Ron will expand his single into an LP, a third book to join his two masterpieces Explaining Hitler and The Shakespeare Wars. And if you want your pants scared off, read his recent How the End Begins, which analyses the prospects for nuclear Armageddon.)  

In Rescuing Evil, Rosenbaum explores, among other things, “theodicy,” or the study of the question: How can an omnipotent loving Divinity allow evil to permeate human existence?  Ron narrows the discussion further to human complicity, otherwise known as free will: or the “evil intention within human beings, the deliberate, knowing choice to do harm, do wrong, cause suffering.”

It has become customary to point the finger at external factors: the evildoer is actually the victim! Parental abuse is to blame, a cruel environment, poor diet, addiction, an “anger problem.” And then there are folks about whom it’s said, with a mystified shake of the head, that they’re “just born evil.”

Could a baby be born with a propensity toward wrong over right? Are we talking genetics here? Or are we in the realm of reincarnation?

I bring this up because reincarnation is the theme underlying my paranormal-suspense-mystery Jane Was Here (just published in hardcover and ebook). In the story, several characters caused the suffering and murder of young Jane Pettigrew in a small Massachusetts town in the year 1853. They have been reincarnated to the present, to the same town, where they are already atoning for their past misdeeds by leading somewhat wretched lives. They of course have no memory of their past lives, and so think of themselves as ‘unlucky.’ Enter Jane, herself reincarnated, and haunted by a fragmentary memory of her long ago lifetime. She seeks answers, and at the end of the story she gets them. Her presence in the town eventually causes a cataclysmic karmic event that dispatches the guilty and restores the innocent.  

I, as the author, was in charge of karma for the duration of Jane Was Here. Therefore the meting of justice is tidy and fair, with no loose threads: mystery solved. But once we exit the blithe play of fiction, the rules of karma become once again baffling.

In a 1945 speech before the Theosophical Society in London, one Lord Dowding declared: “I have some reason to suppose that those who sowed the seeds of abominable cruelty at the time of the Inquisition reaped their own harvest at Belsen and Buchenwald.”  The speech caused a furor at the time, understandably. He was suggesting that the victims of the Holocaust were the past-life Christian murderers of heretics and apostates. The wheel of karma neatly regenerated these souls, centuries later, as Jews, the ultimate apostates according to Christians, and they received the same fate to which they condemned others during the Spanish Inquisition.

Reincarnation, tidy and fair, explains the most emblematic wholesale massacre of the 20^th century. Except, like a snake eating its tail, this spiritual logic returns us to the same question we began with. Are the Nazis who committed evil destined to return as victims next? Were they in Rwanda, to be cut down by a fresh mob of malefactors, men and women who also chose to commit wholesale evil? And who must then be reborn themselves to be punished by…and so on. The implication is that evil is recycled. How could a loving Divinity permit it?

The Buddhists, who kind of skip God, would say that the soul is a student, sent by divine design into a world of duality. Here good and evil are necessary: they’re in fact an assignment. The soul must face challenge and conflict in order to evolve – or devolve – according to which choices it makes. And return the soul must to planet earth, again and again, until it’s fully enlightened (or its karma is lightened) – at which point it no longer needs lessons in this world of terrifying division.

I don’t have the genius, scholarship, or intellect of Ron Rosenbaum to sift through such questions. I know an abyss when I see one. I prefer mystery fiction over divine mystery; I’ll choose to write a book with the answers in the back.

Jane Was Here is available in hardcover and ebook formats at Amazon and other online bookstores, or by order at your local bookstore.

Ron Rosenbaum’s Rescuing Evil is available for Kindle at Amazon.com.